Robert George Thompson
PFC Robert G. “Bobby” Thompson served with Charlie Company, First Battalion, 24th Marines.
He was reported missing in action at Saipan on 25 June 1944.
Branch
Marine Corps Reserve
Service Number 473176
Current Status
Remains not recovered.
Recovery Organization
This case is under Active Pursuit by the DPAA.
History
Robert Thompson – “Bobby” to friends – was born in Brooklyn, New York on 8 December 1922. He was the oldest of three boys raised by Edwin and Margaret Wilhelmina (Bushkaroff) Thompson, and grew up playing on the streets of Richmond Hill with his brothers Arthur and Edward. Bobby enjoyed basketball, swimming, and developed an interest in electrical wiring.
His world upended in 1937, in his last year of grammar school. Edwin, a racetrack bookie and the family’s sole breadwinner, abandoned the family and cut off all contact. “Separated, not divorced,” Margaret explained, “no support from him, and his whereabouts are unknown.”[1] The four remaining Thompsons packed up and moved to an apartment at 743 Halsey Street in Brooklyn’s Stuyvesant Heights neighborhood. Despite their reduced circumstances, Bobby still managed to attend two years of vocational school, studying algebra, metal shop, and electrics. When the family’s financial situation grew dire – the 1940 census shows that all were unemployed – Bobby left school and went to work. He started at a Brooklyn A&P factory, operating a taffy pulling machine for the modest sum of $20 per week. Ninety-five percent of his income went to Margaret to keep food on the table. After four months making candy, Bobby found a new job as a stock clerk at the H. L. Green Department Store – but this position only lasted seven months. He was unemployed in the summer of 1942 when he registered with Selective Service.[2]
Bobby Thompson was already thinking about joining the service – it meant stable income and one less mouth for Margaret to feed – but there were obstacles in his path. He suffered an injury of some sort (Margaret described it as a “rupture”) in the summer of 1942, and had to undergo surgery before he could pass the physical inspection. There was also the matter of his teeth: he was missing a few, and the two front teeth were dentures. However, the Marines were not prepared to care about minor dental history when they needed willing volunteers. On 13 October 1942, Bobby Thompson was declared fit for service and duly enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserve. Within a few days he was on his way south, bound for North Carolina and the start of his life in uniform.
After completing an accelerated boot camp schedule at New River, Private Thompson was assigned to duty with Charlie Company, First Separate Battalion (Reinforced). The training was exciting at first – practicing commando-style amphibious landings, running through obstacle courses, learning to use all manner of weapons – but the bitter cold winter made life miserable for the men who lived in the camp’s pasteboard huts. News of a transfer to California in March 1943 was cause for celebration, even if it meant abandoning their designation as an experimental “super unit.”[3]
Thompson spent the balance of 1943 at Camp Pendleton training as a rifleman and platoon messenger. His unit – now called Charlie Company, First Battalion, 24th Marines – soon grew accustomed to the hills and brush of the Pendleton “boondocks,” and the shore of Aliso Beach where they practiced landing from LCVPs and rubber boats. They appeared as background extras in the film Guadalcanal Diary and enjoyed weekend liberties in San Diego or Los Angeles. Mostly, however, they trained – to a degree that some in Charlie Company half-seriously believed the war would end before they got overseas.[4]
Occasionally, a Marine’s boredom, frustration, or naiveté got the better of him. Thompson’s only brush with military justice was just such an occurrence. He failed to return from liberty on 17 October 1943 – and was subsequently charged with trespassing and destruction of property in the town of Long Beach. Thompson was drunk at the time, and staring at a hefty sentence – fifteen days in the brig, plus five in the Long Beach jail. However, in light of his previous good behavior, military officials suspended his sentence and sent him back to duty at the end of the month with a stern warning. It worked: Thompson was never in trouble again, and on 1 January 1944 was promoted to Private First Class.[5]
Thompson shipped out from California on 13 January 1944 to take part in his first combat action: Operation Flintlock, or the invasion of the Marshall Islands. His company landed on the island of Namur on the afternoon of 1 February 1944, and secured the little speck of land in less than a day. Casualties in Charlie Company were relatively light – but still, some men died and others were wounded. Thompson was fortunate to come through without a scratch, and sailed from the Marshall Islands to a new home base: Camp Maui in the territory of Hawaii. In the red dirt and rain, among the pineapples, they began training for combat once again.
Operation Forager, the planned conquest of the Mariana Islands, began on 15 June 1944 with the amphibious assault on Saipan. Thompson’s BLT 1-24 came ashore late in the day, marched through the shattered town of Charan Kanoa, and took up positions near a road junction for the night. A heavy shelling that night cost the lives of several Charlie Company men, including the first sergeant. By morning, Charlie’s casualty report was already higher than it had been in the entire Marshall Islands campaign, and worse was to come. Before the end of the battle, more than 350 members of BLT 1-24 would be wounded, and 83 killed in action.
And two were labeled missing, later to be determined dead: Corporal William R. Ragsdale and PFC Robert G. Thompson.
There are few indicators or clues as to what fate befell Bobby Thompson. Battalion muster rolls indicate that he participated in the battle for Saipan from 15 June to 24 June, and was “missing in action” on 25 June 1944. After a week of extremely heavy fighting, Thompson’s battalion was more or less in reserve on the days surrounding his disappearance, suffering only a few slight casualties as they occupied Saipan’s Kagman Peninsula. A man might go missing for any number of reasons – but it is known that Thompson’s outfit was not in pitched battle at the time.
In 2015, Horace Allen offered some new insights into Thompson’s disappearance. Allen was a flamethrower operator with Charlie Company; he grew up in Northport and palled around with Thompson as a fellow New Yorker. He was burned around the face and eyes on 18 June 1944, but still remembered what he saw before evacuation.
I seen him get hit. He went down, and we had to fall back. I don't know that anybody got to him – I was just about blind by that point, anyway.
Allen’s statements square with the events of the day: D-plus-3 was one of the few times when BLT 1-24 had to give up ground to an Japanese counterattack. Hit by tanks and infantry as they prepared nighttime positions, the battalion managed to stave off a rout but fell back several hundred yards. Although suffering eye injuries, Allen was quite adamant about Thompson’s identification – and believed he was left behind in the withdrawal. Other eyewitnesses may have been wounded or killed, too, meaning it took several days for record keepers to realize that nobody knew where Thompson was.[6]
Saipan was deemed secure on 9 July 1944; Charlie Company fought battles until 13 July, and then invaded Tinian after a short rest. No word or sign of Thompson was seen in that time. Hopes that he had been wounded and evacuated dimmed as letters were returned unopened. In October 1944 Elinor Taheny, a young lady from Queens who might have been Bobby’s girlfriend, wrote to the Marine Corps for help in obtaining his new address as “all my mail to him since May 1944 has been returned to me ‘undeliverable….'” She received a crushing response: Bobby Thompson was dead and buried on Saipan.
Elinor’s sorrow was eclipsed by Margaret’s. After three months with no word from Bobby, she wrote to the Commandant for news, and received a form letter expressing regrets about his death. Not only had she lost her oldest boy, but her financial state was no less precarious than it had been before he joined the Marines. Arthur was now in uniform – drafted after an ASTP course at Cornell – and she still had Edward to care for. Settling allotments and insurance was only the start of her bureaucratic nightmare.
In 1945, Margaret received a notice from the Army Effects Bureau regarding Bobby’s belongings. She anxiously awaited the promised package, only to open it and discover a stranger’s treasures: another Marine named Robert Thompson. Margaret returned the package with a note – and, infuriatingly, received the same box a second time. “The letter in the box is for the 12th Marines and my son is in the 24th Marines,” she complained – and furthermore, “Robert Thompson PFC 874763 is a colored boy according to his picture, and my son is a white boy.”
Next, Margaret wished for a picture of Bobby’s grave, “so I could see it was his name on it and then would console myself to the fact that Robert is really gone.” A family friend was stationed on Saipan, and Margaret forwarded the information she had been given: 4th Marine Division, Grave #936. The friend found a cross reading “Corporal J. G. Thompson” instead. “Now I don’t know what to think,” Margaret exclaimed. She still had not received her son’s belongings, and was beginning to wonder if he was truly dead.
The final straw came in 1946. Margaret managed to get a letter to 604th Quartermaster Graves Registration Company stationed on Saipan and laid out all her troubles:
If I was to have the body brought home, I would like to know that it was my son. And if I was to make the trip there to see the grave and not find his name on it, why, I would feel bad. As it is I am hoping and praying Robert will turn up somewhere. Although I have gone to different hospitals to talk to different Marines of the 4th Div. and they assured me no prisoners were taken on that Island. But it is still hard to believe he is gone.
Lieutenant John C. Greider of Graves Registration confirmed her fears: the grave did not belong to her son, and furthermore they had no record of his burial anywhere on the island. “I am living in the dim hope that my boy may be alive and in some hospital with a loss of memory from shock,” Margaret wrote in October of that year. “It does not seem possible that all trace of a man could be lost on such a small place…. Grave doubt has been raised in my mind as to his death.”[7] She finally seemed to accept the explanation that his body could not be found – or at the very least, her letters to the Marine Corps finally stopped.
At around this time, the next chapter of Robert’s story was beginning to unfold.
In May of 1945, Graves Registration troops exhumed some of the unknowns buried on Saipan in hopes of accomplishing some identifications. One of the graves they opened was #439, Row 2, Plot 2, of the 27th Infantry Division Cemetery. The exhumation team noted with professional approval that the original burial was “according to Regulation,” and removed a few scraps of decaying blanket. Only bones remained, with no distinguishing marks.
The teeth were unusual, though – several silver fillings, a few decayed or missing. Most unusually, they noted a vulcanite partial denture replacing the two front teeth. Nothing else was found, and the body was carefully reburied.
When the job was done, the supervising officer signed off on the work: 1Lt. John C. Greider.
Three years passed before “X-5” came to light once more. The Saipan cemeteries were closed and exhumed in 1948, with all remains sent to the Graves Registration Service laboratory in Manila. Here, technicians examined personal effects, physical traits, and dental records in an attempt to assign identities to hundreds of unknown remains. “X-5” was wearing a gold ring with a black onyx setting; an etched “F” on the band was determined to be only a manufacturer’s mark. Some vertebrae and a patella were missing, and the jaw was fractured, but the teeth were remarkably intact. And so was the vulcanite denture.
Despite the astonishing similarity between the two profiles – especially the dentures – examiners decided that X-5 was not Robert Thompson. The remains were buried as an unknown in Fort William McKinley Cemetery, Manila; and to this day Thompson is still unaccounted for.
[1] Robert George Thompson, Official Military Personnel File (OMPF), Records of the Office of the Quartermaster General, Washington National Records Center, Suitland, MD.
[2] Ibid.
[3] The short-lived Separate Battalions were conceived as a self-sustaining commando force, based on the Raider model but with built-in pack howitzer batteries and additional support structures. They were intended to land on remote beachheads and conduct independent long-term operations without requiring a large fleet in support. The concept was scrapped in early 1943.
[4] Author conversation with Sergeant Major Mike D. Mervosh, 2015.
[5] Muster roll, Company C First Battalion, 24th Marines, 4th Marine Division, at Camp Joseph H. Pendleton, October 1943. Unfortunately, this misadventure meant Bobby Thompson missed having his picture taken for the regiment’s commemorative “Red Book.”
[6] Conversation with Horace “Al” Allen, 2015.
[7] All quotes from Margaret’s letters from Thompson OMPF.
Decorations
Purple Heart
For wounds resulting in his death, June 1944.
Next Of Kin Address
Address of mother, Mrs. Margaret Thompson.
Location Of Loss
PFC Thompson was last seen at an unspecified location on Saipan.